The Changing Political Landscape of the 2016 Presidential Campaign

Urban crime and poverty, two elements of what’s been called “urban decay” since the early 1900s, are frequent topics of the presidential campaign, especially thanks to the republican candidate. If you watched any part of the Republican National Convention, you heard depictions of cities that are bleak, a sentiment of the party since the Nixon administration. Fact checking of the presidential candidate’s speech, particularly the crime statistics he used, has shown this narrative to be a distorted reality of urban America today. But in an arguably post-fact-checking world it hardly matters for two reasons, both of which are quite practical when considering his need to appeal to moderate, undecided voters.

First, for around 40 years a large segment of the voting population has spent their time fetishizing urban decay for one reason or another. The fetishism is so strong and pervasive, and intertwines poverty and crime to such an extreme degree, that the drop in crime of the last 10 years or so has not changed the way anyone thinks or talks about urban poverty. Here are brief, clumsy and partisan summaries of urban decay fetishism from this era:

To conservatives, urban decay is fetishized because crime and poverty are very important to them. Conservatively-minded citizens, who largely reside in suburban and rural areas, watch the evening news with mouths agape to develop their understanding of urban communities. The stories of urban crime and impoverished neighborhoods consistently validate their choices to avoid civic participation by living somewhere else. An additional element at play for conservatives is a perception of differing social values impacting neighborhood quality. Since they don’t personally know any poor people, they depend on depictions in media (like Reagan’s Welfare Queen) to understand poverty (unless they can afford Showtime and watch Shameless). They prefer to rely on American mythology about meritocracy, which tells us if you’re willing to work hard enough you can elevate yourself out of poverty, despite the fact that your zip code at birth is the strongest predictor of your life’s outcomes. Because republicans maintain majorities in state governments and Congress, public policies and economic development strategies continue to help reinforce their viewpoints, even as poverty persists in rural areas and grows in suburbs.
To liberals, urban decay is fetishized because crime and poverty are not very important to them. Liberals, many of whom live in cities, think that crime is a result of limited economic opportunity rather than a reflection of values. Urban decay has been a result of globalization, and racism. As a result they have become “urban pioneers,” rediscovering existing neighborhoods and driving their economic revitalization. They vote with their wallets by adding to the local tax base. White urban liberals haven’t desegregated their own sections of cities, though they often feel guilty about it. Neighborhoods in rapidly growing cities are gentrifying, significantly contributing to the nation’s staggering affordable housing crisis, which has directly contributed to poverty concentration. Urban decay fetishism has also led to romantic notions of revitalization embodied by the “starving artist,” with their significance to urban futures solidified by the perceived economic power of the white creative class. Because of them, people are creating and consuming things like “ruin porn,” and mostly democratic municipal leaders are providing various forms of incentives to attract them.

Again, these are gross generalizations of the complicated history of American urban development, and the related racial, economic, and political strata of that narrative. But if nothing else, the republican candidate is a media savvy New Yorker who knows the divergent narratives of urban issues, and has mastered the art of breaking these complicated and wonkish topics down into sound bites. By presenting an appeal for urban reform he satisfies his base and hopes to get the attention of some moderates living in cities or suburbs.

Second, the democratic party has some responsibility for rolling back progress on concentrated poverty. In the 1990s democrats didn’t have the leverage needed to restore federal programs designed to implement the War on Poverty, so they focused on criminal justice and welfare reform. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton played big parts in this era of politics, and therefore they’ve had to address the unintended consequences of their work. Mass incarceration has devastated low-income black families. As a result, entire branches of government administering social service programs have reorganized themselves to serve generations of single parent households living in poverty, engaging fathers either not at all or through garnishment of wages for child support. So if your polling numbers with African Americans are in the single digits, why not bring up the Clinton welfare and criminal justice reforms that helped perpetuate urban poverty and recidivism? What’s to lose? In some places, exactly nothing.

The fetishism of urban decay has hit a new level of irony in this election cycle. Yesterday, Donald Trump delivered comments about improving the inner city in Jackson, Mississippi, which is 80 percent black (and has about 30 percent of the population living in poverty), to a majority white audience. It’s pretty safe to assume that after the rally, he and most of the audience promptly got back on the interstate and drove out of town.

Finding A Pathway to Real Urban Revitalization

Setting aside the partisan divide on rhetoric about the condition of urban America, the prevalence of urban issues in comments presented by both parties demonstrates the high level of significance that cities have for our country’s future. But questions remain about what either presidential candidate could realistically do to change the trajectory of crime, poverty, and other platform issues associated with urban America. Many of our urban jurisdictions are grappling with problems directly connected to dwindling or stagnant property tax revenues (inherently local government issues) as well as increasingly concentrated poverty.

The hardest hit cities are those without population growth; these places have lower tax revenue and greater capital needs: crumbling infrastructure, housing and commercial vacancy, higher than average unemployment rates, stagnant earnings, and poorly rated public schools. They have minimal opportunities to access tax revenue from residents of suburban areas that regularly travel into their cities. Families in poverty within cities are struggling to afford housing, transportation, healthcare, and other basic needs. They also lack opportunities to access jobs available at the perimeters of their metro areas, or quality educational services.

Based on current federal practices for administering direct poverty alleviation programs, which are dependent on congressional appropriations and give states relative autonomy to decide how programs are administered, presidential leadership can do little to impact change where concentrated poverty at its highest. For broader efforts to deconcentrate poverty, say through subsidized housing programs, there’s a mixed bag of local, state and federal influences.

For republicans to address urban poverty in the manner described within their 2016 platform, several things would need to happen, but the presidency would have little influence on implementation. The platform offers these recommendations for poverty alleviation and economic mobility: heterosexual marriage, adoption, implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program as originally designed, and fewer licensing requirements for entrepreneurs and childcare service providers. Let’s review who has power to implement these ideas:

The president (or any politician) can do very little about heterosexual marriage and adoption rates, even when considering tax or other regulatory policies that impact both.
TANF is largely regulated by state governments, many of which are republican controlled. States could return TANF regulations to their origins from the Bill Clinton administration, but a recent study shows that by 2014, only 26 percent of TANF funds were being used for cash assistance that goes directly to families living in poverty.
Licensing of small businesses and childcare centers is also largely controlled by state and local jurisdictions. If child care centers receive federal funds (for example, funds for food from the USDA Child and Adult Care Food Program), they may have additional federal regulatory requirements, but partisan divide on regulations for such programs is fairly minimal.

To implement other ideas that republicans have brought up in stump speeches on how to reverse urban decay (particularly crime and poverty), they would have to do one of three things that are highly unlikely. One, they could move back into cities and urbanized areas to influence the landscape of local urban politics and regulatory policies. If you don’t live in cities, you don’t have much standing in how, say, the local police force operates or the cost of a construction permit. Two, they could invest in transit services that would increase access of metro area jobs and schools for urban citizens, which is currently strictly denounced in their platform. Or three, they would have to address the disparate property tax burdens experienced by urban jurisdictions by giving metropolitan planning and development entities greater authority to influence the urban landscape, through programs such as metropolitan tax shares. The state of Minnesota has the most robust example of implementing this approach, but likelihood of other states adopting similar tax redistribution policies is very low.

For the democratic party platform (which addresses many urban issues directly) to be adopted in the manner envisioned by Secretary Clinton, democrats would need to make major progress in winning back political offices at the local, state and congressional level. It’s a tall order to say the least. If Clinton wins the presidential election but the party is unsuccessful in getting a majority in either the house or senate, is country is likely going to experience a very long four years of republicans spending much of their time and our resources continuing investigations on Benghazi, the Clinton email server, the Clinton Foundation, and other yet unknown scandals of the future.

The citizens of cities, who mostly fall on the liberal side of the political spectrum, have celebrated major successes under the Obama administration. Though some policy and programming wins, including the adoption of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule and the reduction in veterans homelessness, directly impact poverty in cities, most of the milestones are associated with progress on social platform issues like marriage equality (though the two are of course not mutually exclusive). Much work remains for the democratic party to make a lasting impact on urban poverty and crime, and earn the endorsements of their diverse party stakeholders. But the popularity of their social platform, which has growing support from suburban areas, creates an opportunity for new coalitions to form. With urban and suburban citizens aligning more closely on social issues than ever before, now is the time to consider how metropolitan planning and partnerships could not only impact poverty and the quality of cities, but reshape the trajectory of American government administration to drive a more economically and environmentally sustainable country.